[Update] Crowdsourcing Citizen Engagement: Tools for Information Architecture & “Wicked Problems”

UPDATE: For those who weren’t able to attend Paul Culmsee’s seminar, you can check out video and slides here.

He starts with a great comparison of Government 2.0 in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand and even riffs off a 2010 GovLoop discussion by Bill Brantley and Andrew Krzmarzick.

Enjoy!

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Wanted to share an upcoming webinar that will resonate with the GovLoop community interested in knowledge management, information architecture, social network analysis, citizen engagement platforms and the “wicked problems” associated with creating engagement in that interstitial space between the CKO and CIO – that space where “engagement” often falls between organizational cracks.

OK, it’s Monday and I just wanted to say “interstitial space.”

Seriously, though – as anyone involved in deploying and implementing online communities of practice knows, that gap between IT (platform infrastructure and service delivery) and actual engagement (employees or citizens) is where the critical success factors lie. Since posts and tweets earlier this spring with Andrew Krzmarzick on information architecture “beyond IT” I’ve been knee deep in that “interstitial space” working on solutions to address those critical success factors for both small and large enterprises.

I’ve had the great fortune to be coordinating in parallel with fellow SharePoint Architect Paul Culmsee as he has developed best practices in successful information architecture utilizing dialogue mapping and interactive (like BEYOND Agile) project management and have seen first hand his success stories in Gov2.0 citizen engagement initiatives in Australia (in particular the City of Stirling).

These “wicked problems” as Paul so aptly puts it, impact communities of practice on two levels:

1) Truly “engaged” information architecture approaches using best of breed tools (like dialogue mapping or rapid protoyping) are key to successfully crowdsourced citizen engagement platforms during the design and planning phases. Developer driven solutions or “deploy it and they will come” approaches too often the miss the mark.

2) SharePoint implementations in particular too often suffer from too much focus on infrastructure or developer driven solutions and lose the truly powerful user-centered design and engagement features. Glorified network share anyone?

Whether you focus on citizen engagmement platforms in general or SharePoint in particular I can assure you that Paul’s presentation will be useful for bringing critically needed tools and approaches to your projects.